On December 8th, 1903, all was in readiness. The aircraft was
perched on its launching catapult, the brave airman at the controls.
The powerful internal combustion engine roared to life. At 16:45
the catapult hurled the craft into the air. It rose straight up,
flipped, and with its wings coming apart, plunged into the Potomac
river just 20 feet from the launching point. The pilot was
initially trapped beneath the wreckage but managed to free
himself and swim to the surface. After being rescued from the
river, he emitted what one witness described as “the most
voluble series of blasphemies” he had ever heard.

So ended the last flight of
Samuel
Langley's
“Aerodrome”.
Langley was a distinguished scientist and secretary of the
Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C. Funded by the U.S. Army
and the Smithsonian for a total of US$ 70,000 (equivalent to
around 1.7 million present-day dollars), the Aerodrome crashed
immediately on both of its test flights, and was the subject of
much mockery in the press.

Just nine days later, on December 17th, two brothers,
sons of a churchman, with no education beyond high school, and proprietors of
a bicycle shop in Dayton, Ohio, readied their own machine
for flight near Kitty Hawk, on the windswept sandy hills of
North Carolina's Outer Banks. Their craft, called just the
Flyer,
took to the air with Orville Wright at
the controls. With the 12 horsepower engine driving the twin
propellers and brother Wilbur running alongside to stabilise the
machine as it moved down the launching rail into the wind, Orville lifted
the machine into the air and achieved the first manned
heavier-than-air powered flight, demonstrating the
Flyer was controllable in all three axes. The
flight lasted just 12 seconds and covered a distance of 120
feet.

After the first flight, the brothers took turns flying the machine
three more times on the 17th. On the final flight Wilbur flew
a distance of 852 feet in a flight of 59 seconds (a strong headwind
was blowing, and this flight was over half a mile through the air).
After completion of the fourth flight, while being prepared to fly
again, a gust of wind caught the machine and dragged it, along
with assistant John T. Daniels, down the beach toward the ocean.
Daniels escaped, but the Flyer was damaged beyond
repair and never flew again. (The Flyer which can
seen in the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum today
has been extensively restored.)

Orville sent a telegram to his father in Dayton announcing the
success, and the brothers packed up the remains of the aircraft
to be shipped back to their shop. The 1903 season was at an end.
The entire budget for the project between 1900 through the successful
first flights was less than US$ 1000 (24,000 dollars today), and was
funded entirely by profits from the brothers' bicycle business.

How did two brothers with no formal education in aerodynamics
or engineering succeed on a shoestring budget while Langley,
with public funds at his disposal and the resources of a
major scientific institution fail so embarrassingly? Ultimately
it was because the Wright brothers identified the key problem of
flight and patiently worked on solving it through a series of
experiments. Perhaps it was because they were in the bicycle
business. (Although they are often identified as proprietors of
a “bicycle shop”, they also manufactured their own
bicycles and had acquired the machine tools, skills, and
co-workers for the business, later applied to
building the flying machine.)

The Wrights believed the essential problem of heavier than air
flight was control. The details of how a bicycle is
built don't matter much: you still have to learn to ride it.
And the problem of control in free flight is much more
difficult than riding a bicycle, where the only controls
are the handlebars and, to a lesser extent, shifting the
rider's weight. In flight, an airplane must be controlled
in three axes: pitch (up and down), yaw (left and right), and
roll (wings' angle to the horizon). The means for control in each
of these axes must be provided, and what's more, just as for a
child learning to ride a bike, the would-be aeronaut must master
the skill of using these controls to maintain his balance in
the air.

Through a patient program of subscale experimentation, first
with kites controlled by from the ground by lines
manipulated by the operators, then gliders flown by a pilot
on board, the Wrights developed their system of pitch
control by a front-mounted elevator, yaw by a rudder at
the rear, and roll by warping the wings of the
craft. Further, they needed to learn how to fly using these
controls and verify that the resulting plane would be stable
enough that a person could master the skill of flying it.
With powerless kites and gliders, this required a strong,
consistent wind. After inquiries to the U.S. Weather Bureau,
the brothers selected the Kitty Hawk site on the North
Carolina coast. Just getting there was an adventure, but the
wind was as promised and the sand and lack of large
vegetation was ideal for their gliding experiments. They
were definitely “roughing it” at this remote
site, and at times were afflicted by clouds of mosquitos of
Biblical plague proportions, but starting in 1900 they
tested a series of successively larger gliders and by
1902 had a design which provided three axis control, stability,
and the controls for a pilot on board. In the 1902 season
they made more than 700 flights and were satisfied the
control problem had been mastered.

Now all that remained was to add an engine and propellers
to the successful glider design, again scaling it up to accommodate
the added weight. In 1903, you couldn't just go down to the
hardware store and buy an engine, and automobile engines were
much too heavy, so the Wrights' resourceful mechanic, Charlie
Taylor, designed and built the four cylinder motor from
scratch, using the new-fangled material aluminium for the
engine block. The finished engine weighed just 152 pounds
and produced 12 horsepower. The brothers could find no references
for the design of air propellers and argued intensely over
the topic, but eventually concluded they'd just have to make
a best guess and test it on the real machine.

The Flyer worked the on the second attempt (an earlier
try on December 14th ended in a minor crash when Wilbur
over-controlled at the moment of take-off). But this stunning
success was the product of years of incremental refinement of
the design, practical testing, and mastery of airmanship through
experience.

Those four flights in December of 1903 are now considered one of
the epochal events of the twentieth century, but at the time
they received little notice. Only a few accounts of the flights
appeared in the press, and some of them were garbled and/or
sensationalised. The Wrights knew that the Flyer
(whose wreckage was now in storage crates at Dayton), while a
successful proof of concept and the basis for a patent filing,
was not a practical flying machine. It could only take off
into the strong wind at Kitty Hawk and had not yet demonstrated
long-term controlled flight including aerial maneuvers such as
turns or flying around a closed course. It was just too difficult
travelling to Kitty Hawk, and the facilities of their camp there
didn't permit rapid modification of the machines based upon
experimentation.

They arranged to use an 84 acre cow pasture called Huffman
Prairie located eight miles from Dayton along an interurban
trolley line which made it easy to reach. The field's owner
let them use it without charge as long as they didn't
disturb the livestock. The Wrights devised a catapult to
launch their planes, powered by a heavy falling weight, which
would allow them to take off in still air. It was here, in
1904, that they refined the design into a practical flying
machine and fully mastered the art of flying it over the
course of about fifty test flights. Still, there was little
note of their work in the press, and the first detailed
account was published in the January 1905 edition of
Gleanings in Bee Culture. Amos Root, the
author of the article and publisher of the magazine, sent
a copy to Scientific American, saying they could
republish it without fee. The editors declined, and a year
later mocked the achievements of the Wright brothers.

For those accustomed to the pace of technological development
more than a century later, the leisurely pace of progress in
aviation and lack of public interest in the achievement of
what had been a dream of humanity since antiquity seems
odd. Indeed, the Wrights, who had continued to refine their
designs, would not become celebrities nor would their
achievements be widely acknowledged until a series of demonstrations
Wilbur would perform at Le Mans in France in the summer of
1908. Le Figaro wrote, “It was not merely
a success, but a triumph…a decisive victory for
aviation, the news of which will revolutionize scientific
circles throughout the world.” And it did: stories
of Wilbur's exploits were picked up by the press on the
Continent, in Britain, and, belatedly, by papers in the U.S.
Huge crowds came out to see the flights, and the intrepid
American aviator's name was on every tongue.

Meanwhile, Orville was preparing for a series of demonstration
flights for the U.S. Army at Fort Myer, Virginia. The army
had agreed to buy a machine if it passed a series of tests.
Orville's flights also began to draw large crowds from nearby
Washington and extensive press coverage. All doubts about
what the Wrights had wrought were now gone. During a
demonstration flight on September 17, 1908, a propeller
broke in flight. Orville tried to recover, but the machine
plunged to the ground from an altitude of 75 feet, severely
injuring him and killing his passenger, Lieutenant Thomas
Selfridge, who became the first person to die in an airplane
crash. Orville's recuperation would be long and difficult,
aided by his sister, Katharine.

In early 1909, Orville and Katharine would join Wilbur in France,
where he was to do even more spectacular demonstrations in the
south of the country, training pilots for the airplanes he was
selling to the French. Upon their return to the U.S., the Wrights
were awarded medals by President Taft at the White House. They
were feted as returning heroes in a two day celebration in Dayton.
The diligent Wrights continued their work in the shop between events.

The brothers would return to Fort Myer, the scene of the crash,
and complete their demonstrations for the army, securing the
contract for the sale of an airplane for US$ 30,000. The Wrights
would continue to develop their company, defend their growing
portfolio of patents against competitors, and innovate. Wilbur
was to die of typhoid fever in 1912, aged only 45 years. Orville
sold his interest in the Wright Company in 1915 and, in his retirement,
served for 28 years on the National Advisory Committee for
Aeronautics, the precursor of NASA. He died in 1948. Neither
brother ever married.

This book is a superb evocation of the life and times of the
Wrights and their part in creating, developing, promoting, and
commercialising one of the key technologies of the modern world.